


anagnorisis

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection...Sort Of?, Missing Scene, Post-Agni Kai, Post-Episode: s03e16 The Southern Raiders, pre-finale, zutara holiday exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28222023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: “It would be so much easier to hate you.”
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 86
Collections: Zutara Holiday Exchange 2020





	anagnorisis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AWildJaxWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AWildJaxWrites/gifts).



> It's a poorly-kept secret that I'm terrified of canon div fic (bc I'm very bad at characterization), *but* I thought I'd take a stab at it for this prompt, which was "hurt/comfort" and which, tbh, I probably didn't follow as closely as I could have. I'M SO SORRY, JAX...I HOPE YOU LIKE IT? But. Nothing says ~ZK feels~ like post-TSR fic, right? ...right? 
> 
> Anyways. This is sort of a series of Book 3 missing scenes that I hope is adequately hurt-comfort-y and which, surprisingly, I had a lot of fun writing. Happy holidays, Jax - I hope you like it!

“It would be so much easier to hate you.”

Zuko knows by now not to respond to that. For all that She’s tried not to let him see behind the walls she puts up for him, he can make out enough of the things she tries to hide through the fissures to know what she is really asking of him most times she speaks. Here, she is not asking for remorse, nor rebuttal; he listens. 

“It would be so much easier to hate you,” Katara repeats from her place behind him in the saddle. He knows enough of concealment to know that she would not be saying these things if they were face-to-face, where he could see the blue of her eyes turn melancholy. So, though the wind makes it difficult to hear when she’s talking to his back, doesn’t turn. “And I _want_ to. And I _tried.”_

Her hatred has always cut to the heart the way he wishes it wouldn’t. It’s so terribly inconvenient, this desperation to be tolerated and respected if not liked, and he’s tried to wish it away but that doesn’t soothe the ache her stone-cold eyes leave behind whenever they fall on him. He deserves this; he will bear it though it cuts. But it _doesn’t_ now. He knows something has shifted in those eyes he cannot see, because if this were her roundabout way of telling him that this quest hadn’t changed a thing, he would _feel_ it. He doesn’t. He listens. 

“And I hate that it’s getting harder.” He can hear her breath catch on a lump in her throat. “I hate that you’re a _person_ to me now when for so long you were a _thing.”_ She mutters something he can’t quite make out and raises her voice above the wind again to add, “it was easier when you were a _thing.”_

Bitterly, he admits to himself that he agrees. He isn’t sure why she’s telling him this but he doesn’t dare ask.

“ _Wars_ are easier when people are a _thing._ No one ever loses sleep over the _things_ that get caught in the crossfire.” Though Zuko can’t see them, Katara’s hands grip the sides of the saddle so tightly that her knuckles whiten. “That’s what I hated you for most of all, you know.”

He doesn’t ask. He knows that she isn’t asking him to. 

“Being _human._ Making it impossible for me to believe that you weren’t as flesh-and-blood and tired and terrified as I was.”

_Oh._

He knows exactly what she means beneath the layers of those words and this time he feels the dull ache of remorse again. She learned of his humanity - the things there are for which someone with a heart like hers could not help but empathize - not much before he reminded her that humanity is fallibility and foolishness and the capacity to get it wrong as much as it is anything that might tug at a tender heart. 

“For a while, that made me hate you even more.” She pauses and it sounds like she sniffles, but he knows better than to respond. “But there was always some part of me that wondered if I’d have done the same in your place.”

He finds that hard to believe and yet he doesn’t at all. Katara, after all, is shaping up to be a dichotomy he can’t untangle, a mess of every imaginable set of contradictions. Maybe that is why she is so quick to jump into the fray - maybe it feels like an extension of the battlefield within, a place she’s come to know all too well. 

(He wishes, not for the first time, that she hadn’t been handed a life that would not let her rest. 

He wishes, perhaps for the first time, that he could’ve given her even just a second of the rest that life has never allowed her.) 

“I knew that I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t deny that it would have been tempting.”

It is jarring to hear those words coming from the girl who’d so recently threatened to end him for the smallest misstep. He’s not sure if he has enough energy left to puzzle out her meaning. 

“That made me more determined to hate you than ever. I’m sure you could tell.” She scoffs. “To be fair, it wasn’t that hard at first. Everything was still too fresh.” He can hear fabric rustling against the saddle as she shifts. “And you just... _cared_ so much. And all I could think was, ‘where was that concern the last time I took a chance on you?’ You certainly didn’t care that much what I thought of you when you _turned on me.”_

_I think I did,_ he realizes. _I just didn’t realize it at the time._

“If someone had told me about all of this back before we’d met, I’d have said that I’d have to be crazy to give you a chance at all, let alone _two._ Hating you would be a whole lot safer than...not.” She lets out a sigh he can hear over the wind. “But mostly, it just feels...wrong. Not hating you.”

_Feels wrong not hating me? I know the feeling._

He doesn’t think it’s an appropriate time to say it, but he’s never been in more thorough agreement with Katara on...well, anything. 

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” Katara’s voice is a little more strained now. “Why are you just sitting here and taking this?” 

“Did you want me to respond?” he asks. 

“You’re supposed to say _something!”_

“I am?” 

“Anything _._ _Please_ just say something. Tell me why you did it. Why you did _this._ Why you care so much when, by all rights, we should hate each other.” Her voice begins to shake. “Just…make it all make sense for once. I don’t even care what, as long as you tell me _something.”_

“Something…?”

“Something better than sitting there in total silence, letting me tell you that I think you’re the scum of the Earth without even _trying_ to defend yourself, like you have some kind of nobility complex!” 

“I thought you were venting.”

“I was.” Katara slumps against the side of the saddle. “But it would be a lot easier to stop feeling so conflicted if you tried to act like you hadn’t done anything wrong.”

“I’ve never been a very good liar,” he tells her. 

She doesn’t say anything for a good, long while after that. 

(He suspects she was looking for a reason _not_ to believe her own words as much as she was asking him to prove them.) 

“Thank you,” she finally says after what feels like hours, and he doesn’t ask why. 

**

A lot can change in the space of weeks. It isn’t much, but it is enough time to strip away the mess and confront what has always been there, if hidden from view. It is enough time to realize that people are complicated and nonsensically messy and it’s easiest not to try to box them in when no one will ever fit neatly. Black-and-white doesn’t fit when people, Katara is learning, have an annoying tendency to paint the world in screaming color. 

Some more than others. 

It’s easiest to admit that there are reasons besides hatred to be drawn to Zuko, and reasons beyond penitence for him to be drawn to her. It’s easiest because it seems, somehow, more natural even then hatred. They are elemental opposites, were once opposites in allegiance, and she’s surprised to find that she’d forgotten that those things need not lead to repulsion. It’s easier, when she catches him watching her practice from further up the beach when everybody assumes that they are both asleep, to admit that she’s grown rather fond of the boy who’d been so doggedly determined to prove his mettle to her. 

It’s easier to say _yes_ when he chooses her - of _course_ he chooses her, he’s been choosing her all along - to accompany him on the day of the comet. It’s easier to let her hand slip into his, let him help her into Appa’s saddle instead of batting his arm away. 

“This is insane,” she says after a few moments of weighty silence. 

“No more insane than anything else we’ve done,” Zuko says, and he doesn’t miss the way Katara’s eyebrows rise. She’s not one to deny that they’ve done no shortage of crazy things in the past year but facing his quite-possibly-unhinged prodigy sister alone seems, even to her, to be one of the crazier ones. “Or anything the rest of us are doing.”

He has a point there. They’ll all have their work cut out for them.

“Do you ever get the feeling that this is all just...completely unfair?” 

Zuko turns to her, head tilted thoughtfully an inch to the side. “What do you mean?” 

“We’re just _kids_ , Zuko. Kids aren’t supposed to go to war.”

“Maybe in a world that actually cared whether we lived or died, that would be true.” Zuko shrugs. “But we don’t live in that world.” 

“That should make me mad,” Katara sighs. “Instead I’m just...used to it. It doesn’t even seem abnormal to me until I’m in a near-death situation or something.” 

He doesn’t want to tell her that he is far past the point of seeing near-death experiences as abnormal, so he changes the subject. “You could say the same of Azula,” he points out. “She’s crazy, but she’s our - _your_ age.”

“Kids against kids.” Katara folds her arms across her chest. “I hate that we live in a world that made that normal.” 

“Yeah.” Zuko doesn’t really know what to say to that - he’s never been entirely sure how to react to Katara’s impassioned speeches about injustice when the fire it stokes within her is so much brighter than his own - but he gives her hand a gentle squeeze to let her know that he’s listening. If he’s honest with himself, he can’t understand why Katara is allowing this, but he isn’t about to complain when the weight of her small, cool hand, tempering the warmth of his own, feels so right in his. “It sucks.” 

“Isn’t it ironic,” that she continues, “that the only way to keep kids like us off the battlefield is to go ourselves and end it?” 

“I guess.” He knows she won’t mind his halfhearted responses - she tends to do more of the talking at moments like this. But he knows she’s right: they are children forced into battle against another child, all in the hopes that - at the expense of their adversary, a child like themselves and a victim as much as she is a perpetrator - they might spare the next generation, and the next and the next and the next, the same fate. That’s what this whole year has been, really: a desperate scramble to right a broken world, the work of a group of children surrendering their childhoods to the protection of other ones. 

He looks over at her, every crease on a face too young to be so lined proof of what she’s had to give up and what she has chosen to, and suddenly he is glad that he is here with her. He is glad that he knows this girl, that she’s trusted him with the parts of her she conceals from the world. He is glad that he has seen her heart - that he sees it every day, in everything she does - and heard her thoughts. Sometimes, privately, he thinks that she must be goodness itself; he has seen her anger and her resentment and he knows, of course, that she is imperfect, but he has never met someone who _cares_ like she does - so unselfishly, with such righteous conviction. She is proof that fire need not feed on hatred to burn. 

He wonders if this is love, this admiration of the purest, barest essence of who she is. It’s hardly the kind of attraction he’s felt before, the kind rooted in beauty or charm or commonality, but he is drawn to her all the same. He wonders if that’s why he’s always felt... _something_ for her. He is indifferent to most people, but he has never even been able to pretend that he is indifferent to Katara. Even when she hated him, even when he thought he hated her - he’s never quite been able to feel nothing. That _something,_ lately, has been a kind of admiration that he can’t seem to shake. 

“I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I didn’t know that we could do this, Katara.” He squeezes her hand again, because her pain dignifies a response even if he doesn’t know quite what the right thing to say might be.

  
“I know.” She squeezes back and, without an ounce of shyness, leans her head against his shoulder. 

**

“You _idiot.”_

He can’t help but smile when his vision clears and she’s leaning over him, arms crossed and teary eyes flashing. He can’t name a part of his body that doesn’t hurt, but he’s rather concerningly unconcerned. 

“You don’t” - he pauses as a cough wracks his shoulders, and he’s suddenly aware of how dry his throat is - “you get straight to the point, don’t you?” 

“Why did you _do_ that?” 

He considers her for a moment, tear-stained face and wide, expressive eyes, and the answer seems impossibly clear. 

“Because you were worth it,” he tells her, simple and true as any declaration of the things he no longer only suspects he feels. 

She smiles, a strained, bittersweet thing, and he opens his arms to her. She’s too careful to lie on his chest when the wound is still a little raw, but she doesn’t turn down the invitation, either, and she slots herself against his side. His arm, however weak, finds the strength to wrap around her shoulders, and she rests her head against his shoulder. 

“Is this okay?” she asks, and snakes an arm around the back of his shoulders. 

“Mmhm.” He leans his cheek against her hair. 

“Doesn’t hurt too much?” 

“Nope.”

“Okay.” 

She is cool when every part of him feels as if it is burning from the inside, and he clings to her; she curls up against him as closely as she knows he wants her, and moves her head ever-so-slightly so that her cheek brushes his shoulder.

He could tell her, here and now, that he loved her, and he’d mean it. But there will be time for that later. 

They have time. _He_ has time because of _her_ and…

Well, he supposes that _she_ has time because of _him,_ too, and if he is the reason that she will live and fight, the reason her healer’s hands will be able to knit a broken world together again for years to come, he doesn’t think he’s ever done something more worthwhile in his life. 

“Zuko?” she asks. 

“Yeah?” 

“Thank you.” 

He smiles. If he weren’t so exhausted he’d shift so he could kiss the crown of her head - he has no idea where that sudden urge came from, but he doesn’t really want to fight it - but he doesn’t. “I couldn’t have made any other choice.”

Again, her cheek brushes his shoulder, and it is a moment before he manages to speak again.

“Katara?”

“Yeah?” 

“I meant it.” 

She knows exactly what he means. 

  
  



End file.
